Common Introduction:

William Blake surpasses the connotative limitations that

the phrase precursor to Romanticism contains as a
signifier since he was an embodiment of multiple
geniuses compacted into one figure. Blakes poetic craft
is a collection of myriad pictures, a mythography that
embodies significant aspects crucial to the overall
theoretical structure of William Blakes philosophy and
metaphysics;- those aspects being state of childhood,
state of innocence, states of worldly experience,
repression, suppression owing to divisive, corrupting,
darkening influences, Judeo-Christian symbolic metastructures,
ethno-religious
rituals
and
their
psychosomatic implications.
As anthologies that received his personal attention, the
Songs are extraordinary not only because, as Bowra
maintains, they constitute one of the most remarkable
collections of lyrical poems in English, but also due to the
fact that they provide an exclusive entry into the
exceptional mythopoeic universe of Blake, populated with
unique symbolic constructs that make sense only in the
world that he has both written and engraved into
existence. The Songs, one of Innocence and another of
Experience, illustrate two contrary states of the human
soul that both work in opposition to, and ultimately
complement each other, - a principle of profound faith
further supported by the most oft-quoted maxim of Blake:

without contraries there is no progression. In his scheme

of things, The Songs of Innocence signify freedom and
liberty, purity and uninterrupted enjoyment whereas the
Songs of Experience are populated with symbols of
chains, manacles and iron-rods, fierceness and jealousy,
defilement and corruption. But both states are inevitable
as far as the maturation-process of the human soul is
concerned in a fallen, degraded world of shattered
dreams and vitiated motifs.
The Lamb:
Blakes verses with regard to the Songs of Innocence and
those of Experience are meant for children, and this fact
encourages their depiction in nursery rhymes which he
incorporated in his complicated mythography admirably
and laudably, cautiously avoiding strong and hyperbolical
expression of words, suiting the lines to the purpose of
childish rhythmic structure. The limited vocabulary
consequent upon it, therefore, was an ingredient
unfavourable to him on his way towards the goal of
finding expression to his elaborate metaphysical system.
So quite naturally, the poet sought the assistance of
symbols, allegories and metaphors for transforming his
abstract visionary images in to a concrete from which
might help the reader to follow his way of thought in the
words of F.W Bateson, He used his symbols to express
increasingly subtle and complex intellectual distinction.
Blake, in his Songs of Innocence, strives to represent the
children out of the vicious circle of oppression and restore
them to a heavenly state of unperturbed bliss that is

characterized
by
purity,
guiltlessness,
liberty,
vulnerability and uninhibited enjoyment of innocent
fancies. The Lamb is a most remarkable poem in which
the lamb is a symbol of The Lamb of God that taketh
away the sin of the world. In this symbolic universe the
harmlessness of the lamb and the purity of the heart of a
child are nothing but the manifestations of Christs
innocence. In the world of innocence even the meanest
creature such as a lamb is treated as having unbound
divinity. Here is an exclusive unification of the three
characters Christ, Child, and the Lamb that constitute
and enact the Christian concept of Trinity in the world of
innocence. This identification between the creator and
the created which accords a symbolic dimension to the
lambs gentleness and meekness is fraught with
theological-metaphysical implications. The line, He is
meek and he is mild is an echo of Charles Wesleys
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.
It underlines the
devotional motivation behind the poem and relates it to
the tradition of moral tales for children which flourished
during the last decades of the 18 th century. Christ is the
Lamb of God; the child is often called little lamb, a term
of affection. But Blake also widens the reference by
recalling Jeremiah, Thou, O lord, art in the midst of us,
and we are called by the name, leave us not, or We are
called by thy namewe are the lords chosen people.
These inter-textual reminiscences give richness and
depth to an apparently simplistic sentiment and make it
out as a profoundly religious view of the world. It may be
remembered in this connection that for Blake the true
God is the God of love, of whom Christ is the most perfect

embodiment. Sometimes the poet speaks of Him in

traditional Christian terms, as in the first line of the Lords
Prayer, but usually he does not think of Him as dwelling
apart from in heaven, or as an abstraction in the void; He is within each one of us. God is the best self of each of
us, and in so far as we live up to the highest that is within
us we become God like. What Blake means is of course
that there are divine qualities in every one; but it is
simultaneously more than that. As a staunch believer in
the divine nature of the faculty of imagination, for Blake
God is the source of it, He is defined, accessed and
realized by it. The concept of Godhead, for him, is as
immanent in the Kantian sense of the term as is
imagination. The Lamb, then, becomes a significant poem
with mythopoeic overtones that underscores imaginative
purity, an idea strengthened by the lilly-fed lamb of the
Book of Thel where purity is followed by soulful
contentment
and
celestial
fulfillment.
In the larger Blakean scheme the lamb symbolizes the
tender, soft and less harsh aspects of human soul,
represents the four fundamental qualities of Innocence as
attested by Blake, namely, mercy, pity, peace and love;
acting, therefore, as a counterpart to The Tyger in the
Songs of Experience. In other words The Lamb and The
Tyger represent two contrary states of the human soul:
the humility and innocence of childhood and the violent
terrifying features of maturity.
The Tyger:

Songs of Experience records, in the poets own words, the

conditions of suffering and distress that are not natural
to man, but nonetheless pave the inexorable way toward
Experience, as he has explained in his annotations to
Swedenborgs Divine Love. Experience is a phase where
Urizenic values predominate; it offers an absolute and
poignant contrast to the state of Innocence. This overtly
oppositional representation renders the innate yet explicit
horrors of Experience all the greater as the twin phases
constitute, as it were, an irreconcilable antithesis.
But in the midst of this pervading gloom of Experience,
Blake offers possibilities of retribution, redemption, and
emancipation. The Tyger demonstrates this promise; it is
indeed, in the words of M. D. Paley, an educt of the
prophetic imagination. This poem has garnered high
praise from eminent poets like Coleridge and Swinburne,
with the later describing the Tyger as a force of
monstrous matter.
The Tyger, in Songs of Experience is in absolute contrast
to The Lamb of Songs of Innocence. The sense of
bewilderment and confusion of the poet at the sight of
this incomparable beast is conveyed by the short and
successive questions. Some of these questions are left
incomplete, as if the poets incomprehension, awe and
admiration were too great to permit him to complete
them. The context of a person asking questions and
getting puzzled at the physical and emblematic force that
the tiger symbolically represents signifies the dawning of
realization and appreciation of the cosmic forces at work.
The impression of terror distilled that the beast produces
is worked through the repetition of such words as

fearful, dare, or terror. The poet wonders how God

dared to create such a beast which is perfectly capable of
upsetting the balance of the entire universe, striking
terror at the heart of even heavenly beings. At simplest
level of meaning Blake seems to reflect on the fact that
the world includes fierce strength that is terrifying and
also admirable. This reality or philosophical realization
seems to be a challenge to the idea of a kind creator. But
in fact the tigers fierceness and the lambs gentleness
are contrasting qualities of human mind. The theme itself
is no doubt is a commonplace one but Blakes poem lets
us contemplate it in its emotional intensity.
The elegance of the tiger occasions a
strange thought in the poets mind that it is not created
in this world but somewhere in the skies or in the distant
days. The poet wonders how the creator dared to fetch
the fire for the eyes of the tiger. The poet wants to know
the artistic formula by which the robust hands gave birth
to such as unearthly creature as the tiger. He wonders at
the handiwork of God, who, like a blacksmith, set to work
on his most amazing creation. The muscle of the tigers
heart and the deadly terror of the tigers brain make the
poet wonder at the strength and audacity of the Almighty
who created it. After his act of creation the creator might
have smiled at his achievementimplying that the cruel
beast had satisfied the sinister intentions of the Creator.
The poet finds it almost unbelievable that God who
created the lamb also created the tiger,
Did he who made the Lamb
make thee?

In the poem The Tyger Blake conveys his complex

meaning with the help of his ambitious, essentially
personal symbolic structure. The striking feature of the
poem is that the poet presents the fierceness of nature
not through a symbolic objecta tiger but through that
object embodied in a particular vocabulary, starting from
the way tiger is spelled. The description of burning
eyes for instance has got crucial uncertainties of
meaning. Primarily the phrase itself makes the whole
tiger a symbol of a burning qualitywrath, passion and
order. Again the word bright modifies the kind of burning
suggested with an additional sense of illumination. Blake
in this poem makes the use of symbolic language that
stimulates a group of feelings, and attitudes that might
refer to a multitude of associations.
The Tyger and The Lamb, the two are the
most representative poems of Songs of Experience and of
Innocence. Kathleen Kaine says of these two poems,
from many passages in Blakes longer poems it seems
that the Tyger is an embodiment of evil and a corruption
of humanity: tigers and lions are called dehumanized
men, Lamb and child, on the contrary, live in the vision of
eternity, the world of Jesus and the imagination.
But far from being just a counterpart to The Lamb, this
poem,
evaluated
from
a
fully-realized
Blakean
mythography, becomes something incomprehensibly
vaster in scope, too ambiguous to allow a definitive
interpretation. If the forests in the poem, as for example,
represent political oppression signifying the postrevolution Jacobin terror and persecution in France, then

it is evident that Tyger stands out as a force of liberation.

Again, as a staunch believer in the divine nature of the

faculty of imagination, for Blake God is the source of it,

He is defined, accessed and realized by it. The concept of
Godhead, for him, is as immanent in the Kantian sense of
the term as is imagination. Tyger may, therefore, from
this perspective, equally represent the organizing
imagination generating the terrible symmetry of the
beast, the faculty of imagination which, unrestrained,
can have the apocalyptic manifestation in the figure of a
tiger and that can only assure the celebration of the
principle of imaginative realization.